Nightshifted

* * *

I’d spent another lovely hour trying to reach the end of the Internet with an accompaniment of German when the phone on the baby’s half of the room rang. I looked at the receiver in disbelief as it rang again. It had to be a wrong number. Surely the call wasn’t for the eight-month-old. I walked across the room and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Edie—it’s Gina.”

“Awww, so you guys miss me?” I teased.

“Edie, it got out.”

“What did?”

“The dragon.”

I looked around the room, with its cheerful pink paint and my peaceful sleeping patients. It seemed so safe. “Is this some sort of hazing? Because I’m new, I get it but—”

“It tore off its muzzle and melted a hole in the back wall.”

Just then, the fire alarms went off. The red lights set into the hallway ceiling began flashing, and nurses up and down the hall began fire safety routines. I heard and felt the thunk of closing doors.

The intercom coughed to life above. “Fire on floor seven, building M.”

“Oh shit,” I whispered.

“I think his transformation kicked the syphilis up a notch,” Gina continued. “He stopped responding to verbal commands an hour ago. If I had to guess—and remember, I was never a reptile expert—I’d say he’s got syphilitic insanity. I gave him a lot of tranquilizers when he started getting restless. They should slow him down.”

“Anything else?” I hid my conversation from the nurses in the hall by ducking behind the privacy curtains.

“He’s coming up your stairwell,” Gina went on. “He could just want to get outside the building and fly off, but I thought you should know. The Shadows are on it, regardless.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She paused, and I thought I could hear her swallow. “Good luck.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I closed the doors to my rooms, per fire safety protocols. Most fire alarms were drills. But hospital protocols weren’t set up to take care of dragons. Fire-breathing dragons. Fire-breathing insane dragons.

And … syphilis? Really? Like Al Capone? I paced around from one room to the other. Sure, nurses were all trained on STDs. That hadn’t stopped me from having unwise and unprotected sex with a British stranger two nights ago, though. Shit.

I looked from Shawn to the baby. Both of them were technically virgins. And both of them needed oxygen to survive. There were mobile tanks for times like these. I went out to the charge’s desk.

“Shouldn’t we move them down the hall?”

“It’s probably burning popcorn on the Med-Surg wing,” she said coolly.

“Are you sure?”

She sat straighter before responding to me. I could tell I was close to getting yelled at. Maybe afterward, one of the Betty Boops would offer me a lolly. “Just stay in there till it’s over.”

I walked back and looked like I was doing patient care for the baby, closing the curtains to give myself time to think. Where should I go? What should I do?

Surely the Shadows would take care of things, quickly. They would, right? Which actually was my second problem. If the dragon did come here—was coming right past here, according to Gina’s implications—I couldn’t react ahead of time. If the Shadows were coming, and they were going to fix things, they might not erase everyone’s memory about how that float nurse panicked and covered herself and her patients in water before pushing them up the hall without O2. If I panicked now over nothing I’d never get to work in PICU again, or any other floor, for that matter. Hospital gossip travels faster than stat drugs down an IV line. And really, where could you go to hide from a dragon, anyhow?

A fresh string of German startled me. I looked over and saw the small light on the CD player glowing yellow. I walked toward it and noticed that as I did so the temperature in the room shifted, becoming warmer. I paced back—cooler. Toward Shawn? Warmer. Downright hot. We didn’t have radiant heaters overhead here to malfunction, and there were no air vents nearby jetting out warm air. The scent of burning plastic began to permeate the room. If the dragon were just in the stairwell, we’d be fine. If it wasn’t, though—I ran to both sides of the room and hauled the curtains closed.

“Everything all right in there?” my charge yelled through the door. I barely heard her.

“Fine!” I shouted back. “Just have to clean him up is all!” How close was the dragon? I poured water into a plastic tub, then splashed it onto the floor. It went everywhere—and at the metal seams where the floor met the wall behind Shawn’s bed, it hissed into steam.

“Fuck.” I leaned over. “Shawn. Wake up. Shawn.” I touched his shoulder, then realized my mistake, and began tapping at his cheek. “Shawn!” I hissed, whispering as loud as I could.

“Wha?” One eye blinked open.

“I’ve got to move you.”

He closed his eye again. “Then move me already.”

“No, not like that. Like off the bed.”

Now both eyes opened. “Why?”

“I can’t really explain it. But you and I and the baby—we’ve gotta get into the bathroom over there.”

Confusion crowded his features together. “Is it a tornado?”

That was a more plausible reason than any other I had. “Yes. It’s coming fast.”

I grabbed the pediatric ambu bag off the wall, and assembled it, swallowing hard. Last time I’d done this … but this time would be different. It had to be. I put the bed on max inflate, and shoved a side rail down.

“I can’t breathe for you while I move you,” I said while popping the vent off his trach and replacing it with the ambu bag. “So I’m going to hyperventilate you now.”

His eyes were large and frightened. The German rose around us as the temperature did, encouraging me to quicker action.

“Okay. On the count of three, here we go!”

I put the ambu bag down and leaned backward.

Shawn wasn’t thin for his age. And he couldn’t help me move him at all—he was the proverbial sack of potatoes. I hauled him out of bed like a rag doll, and lurched into a squat under his new weight.

“Come on!” I said as much to myself as to him. I staggered back till the curtain ended, and then went quickly toward the bathroom on the baby’s side of the room, as far away from his wall as I could get, dragging him in a duck walk, my calves screaming in pain. When we got there I pulled him through the door, and dropped him on the ground, panting. I gave him two long puffs of air before hauling him until his legs were inside and I could close the door.

“I’ve gotta go get the baby now, okay?” I told him.

“I thought you were kidding,” he whispered around his trach.

“I wish.”

Two more puffs from the ambu bag, and then I went outside. The CD player’s light was shining a furious red behind the curtain in Shawn’s corner. I grabbed the baby and turned the oxygen and her monitor off, carrying her quickly into the bathroom, locking and closing the door behind me. We waited.

I alternated between breathing for Shawn and the baby, and all the while it was getting hotter.

There was a thump from outside the bathroom. I flinched, and Shawn’s eyes went wide. The handle started to turn.

“Float nurse? Are you in here?” The locked handle shook. “You’d better be in here!”

“Shit.” I heard a scraping at the outside of the lock. There was nothing in a hospital that couldn’t be unlocked. Except for the were-corrals on Y4.

“I can’t explain right now. Just go away!” I shouted, but I heard the jingle of keys. I reached up and held the handle.

“Look, lady—Enid! Esther! Whatever the hell your name is! Open up!”

I strained back but I couldn’t reach Shawn’s trach and hold on to the door. I let it go, and it opened forcefully, thudding into Shawn’s immobile calf.

“What are you doing in here?” the charge nurse yelled through the crack in the door as she tried to force it wider.

I looked up at her. The Betty Boops on her scrubs were shuddering in rage. Pediatric nurse anger combined the best elements of maternal wrath and the worst elements of wronged woman. “I’m sorry.” I knew she couldn’t go away. If I were in her shoes, I knew I wouldn’t.

The heat radiating in from behind her was tremendous, like an oven heating to broil. She leaned down to shove Shawn’s leg out of the way of the door. “What the hell did you do to the thermostat?”

“It’s the fire—” I sputtered. “It’s below us.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you have me wheel you out of the room?”

“Popcorn, remember!” I shouted at her.

“Not the patients. You. I would have gladly wheeled you out if I’d known you were going to do this. Do you know what kind of incident reports I’ll have to write now?” She glared at me.

“That’s the least of my concerns,” I said, still alternating breaths for Shawn and the baby, taking the ambu bag and squeezing it over the baby’s face and attaching it to Shawn’s trach in turns. She was sweating, I was sweating, Shawn was sweating. It was time to go for broke. “Look—there’s a fucking pissed-off dragon coming up the stairs. We need to hide until the Shadows get here.”

“You need to hide till security gets here—that’s for damn sure,” she muttered. She took a step back, and I knew she was going for the phone to call me in.

Then the room was filled with an unholy roar, like a hundred cars crashing into one another at high speed, so loud it hurt. The charge nurse’s jaw dropped open and I knew she’d heard and felt it too.

I reached down and yanked Shawn’s legs up. “Get in here.” She did so without question, without turning around, closed the door, and I heard her flip the lock.